Comment by war1025 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by war1025 | Hacker News Reader

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Sort of a tangent, but I've wondered before if the "Nephilim" mentioned in Genesis could have been some distant memory of when Humans coexisted with Neanderthals.

From Wikipedia:

    When people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that they were fair; and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose. Then the Lord said, "My spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh; their days shall be one hundred twenty years." The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.
    — Genesis 6:1–4, New Revised Standard Version

Basically says that there were people like humans, but different and larger and stronger. And that at some point they died out.

Sounds a lot like what we know about Neanderthals.

Also Genesis is sort of the "deep memory" of humanity. Especially the first few chapters.

Genesis is dated to no earlier then 2500 years ago, probably much later. Neanderthals left the scene about 68000 years before them.

Compared to the Neanderthals, Genesis writers are our contemporaries.

Genesis writers first-hand knowledge about Neanderthals is similar to that most people nowadays have. Their general knowledge is far lesser.

The writers of Genesis are our contemporaries, but my understanding is that the first few chapters is a recording of oral traditions that stretch back way further than that.

Most probably, but couple of thousands of years? more then 30,000?

Why not, though?

Would how often, in 100, 1,000, 10,000, or 100,000 years would the complete chain of human intellectual lineage be broken, and a generation of people be raised with absolutely no input from the preceding generation?

Look through Wikipedia's page on Indo-European vocabulary (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_vocabulary#Kinsh...), and see how recognizable some of the fundamental building blocks of communication are, despite the passage of time, movement of people, and rise and fall of societies.

If word forms can so readily be passed down multiple inheritance trees over thousands of miles and years and still be somewhat recognizable, how improbable is it that we inherited living stories that co-evolved with us through thousands of generations?

I see the link you provided as evidence to the improbability of GP's premise.

Consider that common daily used words can change to a degree that they at best resemble their origin, and that in just a single or two millenniums. Do you believe any oral tradition can survive and preserve anything from it's original meaning after 20k years?

Do you know any story about your family from 300 years ago? Do you know anyone who knows (leaving aside kings and the like, where the stories are again only known from canonical origins)? Do you know the name of any of your ancestors from 4,000 years ago? The name of the place they lived in?

We don't have strong oral traditions anymore, so I really have no way to guess how long things can be passed down by cultures that do.

There's evidence the indigenous Australians passed down knowledge of the end of the last glaciation period [1] 10000 - 13000 years ago.

[1] https://theconversation.com/ancient-aboriginal-stories-prese...

Again, 10000 - 13000 years ago is much closer to us than the Neanderthals are to the ancient Aboriginal Australians or the ancient Hebrewes. And this stories, if they indeed are 13,000 years old, are by far the oldest example we have.

> Do you know any story about your family from 300 years ago? Do you know anyone who knows (leaving aside kings and the like, where the stories are again only known from canonical origins)? Do you know the name of any of your ancestors from 4,000 years ago? The name of the place they lived in?

We have writing now though. There is much less need to spend time memorizing the oral history of your family line when it can be written down.

At a time when anything you don't teach your children and grandchildren would be lost forever, it was much more important to pass on the stories of your ancestors through oral histories.

Heh. Heh.

So, AFAIR one interpretation of the relative ubiquity of ancient flood myths is that most established cultures had to live through a time of periodic glacial lake outburst floods as the climate warmed from the last glacial maxima, along with rising seas inundating some inland basins like the Persian Gulf.

I'm not sure about the probability or improbability of this premise in the grand scheme of all probable events, but it seems fair to call it a plausible premise. These events would mostly fit on a timeline of 15k years ago to 8k years ago. If this explanation holds water, it means that the origin events of these flood myths pre-date the earliest known forms of writing by at least as much as the writing of early known biblical texts predate the conversation we're having now.

I don't know if I "believe" it, but I definitely wouldn't bet against it. We're not talking about getting teenagers to faithfully memorize and repeat 100 generations of ancestral begats as read by Ben Stein. We're talking about compelling stories that were foundational to the mythos of who a people are and where they came from.

Indigenous Australian oral history and cave paintings reference the "dreamtime"[0], which is plausibly the group's initial ocean crossing perhaps ~45k years ago.

More definitely, here[1] is an Australian oral tradition that records a catastrophe ~7k years ago.

The picture is super blurry but then so is Genesis.

[0] https://austhrutime.com/first_boat_people.htm

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/sep/16/indig...

Genesis is but one example of an oral folklore. All cultures had them (before writing ... which invented forgetting, ref Socrates). i would not at all be surprised if their cladogram is pushed back in time to when we shared the earth with other Homo species

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_mythology

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